Unique challenges for transgender player

SPORTS Taunts don't deter Mission College's transgender athlete

Ellen Huet

Updated 11:29 am, Friday, March 1, 2013

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Image 1of/8

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 8

Gabrielle Ludwig lines up with her teammates as they celebrate winning a game against Cabrillo College last Friday. The Lady Saints next play at CCSF in a Northern California regional playoff game on Friday night.

Gabrielle Ludwig lines up with her teammates as they celebrate winning a game against Cabrillo College last Friday. The Lady Saints next play at CCSF in a Northern California regional playoff game on Friday

Ludwig says that despite the abuse she has faced from fans in her freshman season, she's trying to make the struggle a bit less arduous for the next transgender person who wants to play on a sports team.

Ludwig says that despite the abuse she has faced from fans in her freshman season, she's trying to make the struggle a bit less arduous for the next transgender person who wants to play on a sports team.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Image 3 of 8

Gabrielle Ludwig (42) and her Mission College teammates prepare for a photo before facing Cabrillo College. Ludwig's teammates say she's the wise and sensible one on the Lady Saints.

Gabrielle Ludwig (42) and her Mission College teammates prepare for a photo before facing Cabrillo College. Ludwig's teammates say she's the wise and sensible one on the Lady Saints.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Image 4 of 8

Ludwig gets a hug from her partner, Theresa Foakes, after Mission College's victory last Friday.

Ludwig gets a hug from her partner, Theresa Foakes, after Mission College's victory last Friday.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Image 5 of 8

Ludwig (R) chats with head coach Corey Cafferata during warmups before their game against Cabrillo College. Ludwig is a transgender woman who's 51 years old and playing on the women's basketball team at Mission College in Santa Clara, CA Friday February 22nd, 2013.

Ludwig (R) chats with head coach Corey Cafferata during warmups before their game against Cabrillo College. Ludwig is a transgender woman who's 51 years old and playing on the women's basketball team at Mission

Ludwig huddles up with her teammates as they celebrate winning their game against Cabrillo College.

Ludwig huddles up with her teammates as they celebrate winning their game against Cabrillo College.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Image 7 of 8

Ludwig picks up her daughter Ciarra Foakes, 7, following her teams win against Cabrillo College.

Ludwig picks up her daughter Ciarra Foakes, 7, following her teams win against Cabrillo College.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Image 8 of 8

Ludwig (R) and head coach Corey Cafferata talk during an interview before their teams game against Cabrillo College.

Ludwig (R) and head coach Corey Cafferata talk during an interview before their teams game against Cabrillo College.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Unique challenges for transgender player

1 / 8

Back to Gallery

When the Mission College Lady Saints tip off their playoff game Friday night, 51-year-old Gabrielle Ludwig will mostly be worried about her injured ankle and how it might affect her team's winning streak.

The home team, City College of San Francisco, might be more concerned about Ludwig's height. At 6-foot-6, she's unusually tall even for a female basketball player - though someone that size would fit right in on a men's team, like Ludwig did three decades ago, in another life.

Ludwig, a freshman at the Santa Clara school, is believed to be the first transgender person ever to play community college basketball in the United States. Having struggled for acceptance in her personal life since she began living as a woman in 2007, she was prepared for skepticism and worse on the court - and got it in large doses.

When she played her first game in December, the national media descended on the team, and fan vitriol quickly followed. Spectators called her "it" and shouted that she should be playing with the men. Online commenters joked that they could undergo castration and dominate in a women's league.

"My first game, I sucked," Ludwig said. "I was so nervous. ... There were reporters everywhere and in my face. Photographers would zoom in on things that were more masculine on my features or on my hands to sensationalize something."

The attention has continued throughout the Saints' season, sometimes painfully so. Last month, Ludwig invited a fifth- and sixth-grade girls team she coaches in Fremont to watch Mission play Ohlone College. As the girls sat in the stands, Ludwig heard familiar calls from other fans: "Get that 'it' off the court." "Pass him the ball."

"Here's the thing," she said. "I don't mind. But those kids had to hear it, and that's what hurt."

That night, and through the rest of her freshman season, Ludwig has done her best to stay calm. She's trying to make the struggle a bit less arduous for the next transgender person who wants to play on a team, and wants to be remembered as sportsmanlike.

Besides, she said, "I'm tough enough to handle it."

Nagging feeling

Ludwig grew up in Germany, in Wyoming and on Long Island, N.Y., as Robert, whose happy childhood was marred only by a feeling that something intangible was wrong. That feeling drove Ludwig to steal into her mother's closet and dress up in her clothes, something her parents dismissed as innocent fun.

After graduating from high school, Ludwig played basketball at Nassau Community College in New York, but when the season was over she lost interest in school and walked into a Navy recruiting office.

Eight years later, after serving as an aviation antisubmarine warfare technician during the Gulf War, Ludwig settled into home life in the Bay Area with a wife and baby daughter.

But the gender questions, tamped down during her military years, started to resurface. Beginning in the early 1990s, she would venture into San Francisco and seek out estrogen injections. She grew breasts, but hid them under sports bras and men's clothing.

She also bulked up, taking steroids and working out, and got tattoos that trace up one leg and circle both biceps with wolves and feathers - "as a struggle to keep Robert," she said.

"It was horrible," Ludwig said. "Every day I was reminded that I couldn't be myself. You look in the mirror and you see something where your body does not match your spirit. That's an inexpressible degree of private grief."

Making the change

Her marriage ended in 1998. Once her daughter was through high school, Ludwig took the scariest plunge - telling her bosses at Roche Molecular Systems in Pleasanton, where she works as a systems engineer, that she was taking a couple weeks off and returning as Gabrielle.

She told her daughter, her parents and the families whose kids play in her youth basketball league. Some, especially her mother, took the news hard, but everyone was supportive, Ludwig said. And last year, once her health insurance changed to cover most of the costs, she underwent gender reassignment surgery.

She initially enrolled at Mission College last fall because a project at work necessitated some biology lessons. She joked to Mission's coach, Corey Cafferata, whom she'd met months before while he refereed a game for one of her youth teams, that she was now eligible to play for him.

Ludwig made the team after trying out, but getting clearance to play wasn't easy. She was eligible under NCAA rules, which require a transgender player to have undergone one year of hormone therapy, but the California Community College Athletic Association sorts players based on the gender on a birth certificate. Ludwig had to go through a lengthy and expensive court process to have hers amended, and wasn't able to suit up and play until midseason.

Her teammates, who call her "Big Sexy" and "Princess," say she's the wise and sensible one on the team - and one who opened their eyes to her world.

"We had so many questions on her first day," said teammate Felicia Anderson, 20. "She taught us that you don't have to suppress your feelings of not being normal."

Focused on team

For Ludwig, that lesson was easier taught than learned.

She is open about her own journey but would rather talk about the team's path through the season, which ended in a league championship last week. Now the Saints are moving on to the Northern California regional playoffs to face CCSF, which beat them 78-57 in January.

Critics complain that Ludwig's height and 220 pounds give her an unfair advantage. But Ludwig is far from her team's best scorer. She's averaging just under 6 points a game, and Cafferata chooses his words carefully when he says she's played "well."

"She was 6-6," Anderson said. "We didn't care about anything else. We expected a lot of her, though, and I think we forgot she's 51."

Ludwig still holds down a full-time job at Roche and shuttles daily between there, school and her home in Fremont, where she lives with her partner of two years, Theresa Foakes, and Foakes' two daughters, Ciarra, 7, and Alyicia, 11, who call her "Momma Gabbi."

Most of her free time is dedicated to basketball, both playing and coaching.

"I think it's really cool," said Ciarra, munching on a Goldfish cracker. "She just wants to do what she wants."

Ludwig wants to play against CCSF, even though she's been sidelined recently with a hairline fracture in her ankle. And she intends to come back to the Saints next season, when she hopes she won't be such a big deal.

End of the 'freak show'

"I'm tired of people making it out to be a freak show," she said. "I'm just a 51-year-old woman who - oh, yeah, had a sex change, big deal. I love the game. You can go to college at any age. Why wouldn't I come out and play basketball? Yeah, I'm tall and big, but I'm also 51. I think everything evens out."

The payoff for the hostility she's endured, Ludwig says, will come when the next athlete who is gay, lesbian or transgender hears about the 51-year-old woman who had the courage to step onto the college basketball court as her true self.

"Since I decided to go out to the media, there's been a larger purpose - to help the LGBT community and all those people who have lost children because they struggle with, 'God, am I gay, am I straight, am I transgender? F- it, let's put a rope around my neck and hang myself in the garage,' " Ludwig said.

"If I can be a role model, and just let go of some of that burden, then what I do out here and the beating that I take from people in the stands ... it's worth it."

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.